Morgan Stanley

The Fed completed its last POMO monetization for the week, buying back $1.415 billion in bonds dated 2021 through 2040. Oddly enough, the submitted/accepted ratio was a mere 5.98, after hitting north of 10 for the last three POMO actions since the resumption of QE. Stocks now rolling over as the Fed's liquidity appears to have been digested. More importantly, Morgan Stanley continues to shine in its Fed frontrunning recommendations: the firm predicted 89% of the issues monetized by notional, correctly identifying $1.265 trillion worth of the $1.415 Tr in notional bought back. All who followed Igor Cashyn's advice to Buy the 8.0% of 11/15/2021 and sell the On The Run 10 Year (and seeing how at $1.135 Tr monetized, this was the issue most clearly "in play", quite a few did) should find the Morgan Stanley analyst and buy him a shot of vodka.

Debt/GDP ratios are too backward-looking and considerably underestimate the fiscal challenge faced by advanced economies’ governments. On the basis of current policies, most governments are deep in negative equity. This means governments will impose a loss on some of their stakeholders, in our view. The question is not whether they will renege on their promises, but rather upon which of their promises they will renege, and what form this default will take. So far during the Great Recession, sovereign (and bank) senior unsecured bond holders have been the only constituency fully protected from partaking in this loss. It is overly optimistic to assume that this can continue forever. The conflict that opposes bond holders to other government stakeholders is more intense than ever, and their interests are no longer sufficiently well aligned with those of influential political constituencies....Investors should be prepared to face financial oppression, a credible threat against which current yields provide little protection. - Arnaud Mares, Morgan Stanley

Those puzzled by the recent pick up in stocks need not be puzzled much longer: today's POMO operation just closed, and the Fed just monetized $1.35 billion of bonds, an amount which apparently was enough to push stocks by about 0.5% higher, and see a slight sell off in Bonds as holders sold into the Fed's buyback. The submited to accepted ratio was a solid 12.8. Far more relevantly, Morgan Stanley continues to be on a roll in predicting precisely which bonds the Fed will monetize: today, Igor Cashyn got 6 out of the 8 repurchased issues correct. Frontrunning the Fed continues to be the most profitable trade.

One of the biggest economic bulls, and correspondingly bond bears, of the past year, has been Morgan Stanley's Jim Caron, whose earlier estimate of a 5.5% in the 10 Year has cost many a bond investor much money. Today, Caron appeared on Bloomberg Radio with Tom Keene, apologizing for his call, and following up on his latest release in the MS Interest Rate Strategist, which started off: "We got our rates call wrong and missed a great opportunity to be long bonds this year. The market is currently rife with tactical relative value opportunities and that’s what we will focus on going forward. We’re  shifting gears and will become more tactical, playing for rate moves in either direction in shorter timeframes, rather than having our ideas hinge on longer-term macro themes." Indeed, relative value, in the form of various divergence and convergence trades, is where it is at, and where Zero Hedge has been focusing over the past year.

Today's POMO has closed, with the Fed monetizing $3.609 billion in debt, far more than previously expected, and much more than last auction's $2.5 billion (is Liberty 33 sweating in its reliquification attempts courtesy of today's nightmarish economic date). The hit rate was also worse than the previous one, coming in at 16.5%, with 12.2% previously (another way of saying this is that the submitted/accepted ratio was 6.07). And yet again, Morgan Stanley was spotless, with its 9 bond predictions all eligible for purchases, and in fact seeing 6 of the 9 proposed issues purchased by the Fed. In a basket which had 27 eligible CUSIPs, this is quite an impressive result.

Attached is MS' most recent strategy slidepack covering European credit strategy, US rates (for those who just can't get enough of those 2s10s steepeners), credit strategy, and credit and equity derivatives. As the firm now has one the most bullish biases on Wall Street, the pack should at least provide those bearishly inclined with a sense of what not to do.

Update: and, lo and behold, the market was more than prepared to front-run the Fed: the issues prescribed by MS for prepurchasing (and then selling into the Fed's bid), account for 92% of the $2.551 billion in total Bids Accepted (out of a total $20.949 billion in Bid Submitted). The result: a stunningly low 12.2% hit ratio as everyone was more than happy to sell to the Fed. And guess where the cash the PDs just got from the Fed for selling into its bid is going...

This weekend we presented an analysis by Morgan Stanley which attempted to anticipate precisely which bonds will be bought, and which will be excluded (in How To Front Run The Fed With The Best Of 'Em) in today's FRBNY Open Market Operation. To Igor Cashin's credit, his projection was spot on: his suggested 10 issues expected to be monetized all made this list. And, more importantly, the six exclusions were all correct as well, yielding his prediction a 16 out of 16, or A++ score. The full list of securities to be purchased at 11am this morning is presented below. To those who bought in advance of this action as we recommended, congratulations. To those who missed, it, the schedule of upcoming CUSIPs most likely to be purchased in the next 4 auctions through September 1, is recreated below. Once the actual results of the auction with notional amounts is disclosed post auction, we will update this post. Regardless, the massive rip in Treasurys over the past week begs the question: was the action merely one massive frontrunning attempt, and is today's weakness in the Treasury complex just the unwind of that trade...And as for equities, now that POMO is back, it is worthwhile to remember that on POMO days, the market is up about 99.9999*% of the time.

One word how mortgage originators and funding desks feel right now (not to mention Morgan Stanley bull steepener clients): Panic. The 2s10s is now at the flattest it has been since May 2009 and going lower. All leading indicators (such as the Conference Board's, see the musing from the FRBSF yesterday on the topic) that use the flatness of the Treasury curve as an input variable are about to have a heart attack, further indicating the deflation is coming, in turn further pushing the yield lower. Ironically, those who followed Morgan Stanley's recent deflation hedge trade recommendations (1 Year dual digital out 100bp in one year if 2y CMS is below 0.8% and 30y CMS is below 3.3% at expiry for 16.5bp; and the 1y 1s5s conditional bull flattener, for zero cost, struck at 126bp. Currently, the spot 1s5s curve is at 130bp) are well in the money.

So much for trading perfection. After posting a flawless, and statistically impossible without cheating, trading record in Q1, Goldman followed in Bank of America's footsteps and posted 10 trading day losses in the quarter in which we saw the Dow plunge by 1,000 points intraday, and when the S&P ended broadly lower. The firm disclosed 3 trading days with losses of more than $100 million. But most notably, days with $100+ MM daily profitability dropped by more than half from 37 to 17. Of course, as usual, the statistical variance looks nothing like a standard Gaussian distribution. Elsewhere, Morgan Stanley reported 11 days of losses, but $100MM+ profitable trading days at 19, better than Goldman. Is the Morgan Stanley starting to outgun the biggest gun on Wall Street?

We previously presented a piece by SocGen's Albert Edwards that claimed that there is nothing now but to sit back, relax, and watch as the US becomes another Japan, as asset prices tumble, gripped by the vortex of relentless deflation. Sure enough, the one biggest bear on Treasuries for the past year, Morgan Stanley, is quick to come out with a piece titled: "Are We Turning Japanese, We Don't Think So." Of course, with the 10 Year trading at the tightest level in years, the 2 Year at record tights, and the firm's all out bet on curve steepening an outright disaster, the question of just how much credibility the firm has left with clients is debatable. Below is Jim Caron's brief overview of why Edwards and all those who see a deflationary tide sweeping the US are wrong. Yet, in what seems a first, Morgan Stanley presents two possible trades for those with access to the CMS and swaption market, in the very off case, that deflation does ultimately win.

The attached slide deck from Morgan Stanley provides a convenient 5 minute summary of the current state of the global financial and economic picture. Discussing everything from fund flows (nearly $300 billion in domestic equity outflows since the beginning of 2007: strong like bull), to equity hedge fund outflows in Q2 (and fixed income and macro fund inflows), proceeding to the US economy, where the dip in final domestic demand is expected to follow the GDP inflection point shortly (does anyone even remember the disappointing Q2 GDP number posted a long, long time ago last Friday?), a consumer spending number that based on the current saving rate is unsustainable, to the endless rally in corporate profit margins as firms fire any and all non-essential overhead, to China's PMI drop, to Morgan Stanley's reiteration of the bullish Chinese groupthink, to observations of the exquisite correlations between the US ISM, China's PMI, and the MSCI EM Total Perf, the unprecedented decline in US manufacturing as a share of total world manufacturing (charted below), to a hockeystick projection for Emerging Markets where decoupling this time is most certainly different, and other useful, if not particularly original, tidbits of data.

One of the odder stories of the day comes from Dow Jones, which reports that the Chinese Sovereign Wealth Fund (China Investment Corp, or CIC), has sold $138.5 million worth of Morgan Stanley shares in the past week, after dumping 4.53 million shares at $27.17 on Wednesday and 575,000 shares at $27.13 on Thursday. CIC began accumulating a massive Morgan Stanley stake in 2007, when it purchased its initial shares in the then troubled investment bank, and followed up with a June 2009 $1.2 billion investment, The reason for the sale, DJ speculates, is for the fund to avoid "additional disclosure requirements." Yet as a filing as recently as June 18 disclosed, the fund's Morgan Stanley stake was openly disclosed to be 11.64%. Surely the CIC administrator, the PM and everyone else in the front and back office were all too aware of this number. Which is odd since per both initial and follow up purchase agreements, CIC had stated it would not own more than 9.9% of MS' shares, and would remain a passive investor. That the firm would blatantly purchase 16% more than this threshold in the open market by mistake in the past year seems somewhat ludicrous. Worth recalling is that in June CIC disclosed a 10% MTM loss for the month of May, or roughly about the time it announced its above normal MS exposure. Are the two related? Has the CIC been covertly liquidating assets? It is unclear, as the one and only 13F for CIC is still the original one filed from February (covered here). One would imagine there would be at least some SEC requirement that a filer that has issued at least one 13F would be so kind to follow it up with at least a second one... eventually. In the meantime there is no official statement on the transaction: "A spokeswoman for CIC said she was unaware of the reason for the sales. A Beijing-based Morgan Stanley spokeswoman declined comment."

Morgan's Huw van Steenis shares his team's view on the "stress test" catalyst that is supposed to finally put ever-bullish MS in the money, and diffuse the pent up rage of its client base for losing it billions with all those short bond recommendations. The MS report has some quite objective observations: "Given the size of the fiscal and banking sector problems in Europe and elsewhere, a quick and easy solution is unlikely. However, we think a circuit breaker, such as a restructuring and recapitalisation of the banking system, is needed because unlimited liquidity provision by the ECB does not get to the root of the problem. In our view, for the recovery to get onto solid ground both financial and fiscal stability need to be restored equally. The sovereign debt crisis has shown how closely intertwined financial and fiscal stability are. In our view, Europe has been making good progress in mapping out how it intends to restore sustainable budget positions. But there are still concerns amongst investors about financial stability. In this context the stress test is key." Yet unfortunately, as expected, the conclusions are that all is well, despite the test obtaining largely different and far stronger conclusions than even MS' internal pre-testing setup. Nonetheless, a good one document summary of all the findings of the test together with some in depth commentary for those who just need that upside catalyst.

BN   7:52 *MORGAN STANLEY SMITH BARNEY HAD SET 15% MARGIN GOAL FOR 2010
BN   7:52 *MORGAN STANLEY'S PORAT SAYS `FLASH CRASH' SCARED AWAY INVESTORS
BN   7:52 *MORGAN STANLEY CFO PORAT SPEAKS IN INTERVIEW ON PROFIT GOALS
BN   7:52 *MORGAN STANLEY TO MISS BROKERAGE PROFIT-MARGIN GOAL, PORAT SAYS

Luckily the SEC is all over restoring investor confidence in the market... of hard core internet porn.

The2s10s has plumbed fresh new lows: - the most levered trade in the history of the world (the curve steepener for the uninitiated) is now the most abhorred. The amount of neg P&L incurred here over the past 2 months is just staggering. After hitting an all time of 290 in March, the 2s10s has collapsed by over 20% in the last three months. And as the leverage associated with this trade is second to none, the impact of this collapse is magnified hundreds of times, not to mention that the money banks charge for mortgages (if anyone wanted these to begin with) and credit cards is marginally so much lower that Q2 and certainly Q3 bank profitability will be very badly impaired. Which is why we were eagerly anticipating the one firm which has been the biggest defendant of the steepener trade to come out with its "double or nothing" all-in on the economic rebound which is critical for this bearish flattening to terminate. Today, we got our wish. As expected, Morgan Stanley's Jim Caron throws the kitchen sink into the bull case, and this time also pitches the "no fat tails" trade - the same trade that worked miracles for Boaz Weinstein and Merrill Lynch. Alas, with MS clients sick and tired of losing money, almost as much as Goldman's FX clients, this could be too little too late. Furthermore, with trite claims such as "no ‘double-dip’, We expect growth in China to slow but expect a soft landing, No deflation in 2H10, Policy rates to remain lower for longer, Europe to muddle along, and solvency risks in 2H10 overstated" it may be difficult for MS to find the last standing greatest fool out there. As for pitching the "Iron Butterfly" to said fool, good luck. But it sure sounds cool.